I spend more money on Halloween than I do on Christmas. And every year I realize it more and more ... I'm spending money on Halloween to share it all with a bunch of strangers and their children rather than on my own family and friends.

I already give lots to my family throughout the year, I don't need a special holiday to justify those relationships. I used to spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on decorations, suppers, gifts and doing things for family in or around Christmas and none of it ever made a damned difference. I still love my family but it wasn't because of Christmas ... it was because they are my family. I don't do any of that any more and you know? I still have the same level of appreciation for my family and they do the same for me ... without all the BS of Christmas fanfare.

But on Halloween, I'm giving more to random strangers I don't even know or will probably never meet again during the year ... and all just for the sake of being nice to them.

So now I find that Halloween is a more giving and fun holiday than Christmas. It's made me realize just how wholesome Halloween is compared to the commercialized hellhole that Christmas has become.

I had this thought after remembering one time that my DT (digital technologies) teacher at high school suggested that some of the class could try join a hacking competition. Nothing ever came of it, but I thought it was interesting at the time.

What's really interesting is seeing the choices I made, and asking "what if I did the other thing". Just off the top of my head, I could be still at uni doing research on maths or physics, I could be working on designing new robots for who knows what, or branching off even earlier, I could have been a doctor like my parents.

I'm only 24, so it seems like I might be a bit young for this kind of thinking, but there's still a lot of things I could have done differently.

Sometimes you ask a question that's a sincere attempt to solicit an actual answer, but everyone assumes it's a rhetorical question. Like no, I'm actually asking.

I'm sure someone has had this thought before, but this just hit me like a sack of potatoes this morning. Everything is soup.

This sentence is translated from Chinese, so the wording may be suboptimal.

I'm ready to get loads of downvotes for posting this one.

Source: Me.

I'm trying to hang on Cantonese and Mandarin as much as possible, but it's so fucking hard because Cantonese is so triggering of my traumatic memories, and Mandarin just reminds of the CCP. Like... in my mind its so hard to separate langage from parents or a regime.

Seriously, Fuck Black Friday. Fuck the weeks before raising prices. Fuck the pretend 75% off of a piece of shit item that costs 5 bucks to make. Fuck making that item and marking it up 500%. Fuck not paying the person making that item a living wage. Fuck making a trinket that leverages a desperate person's full day of labour away from their families.

There is no Thanks I'm giving here...And specifically a big fucking middle finger to the Amazon that takes lives and makes this world a shittier place.

Save the real Amazon by killing off the namesake corporation.

Fuck you Bezos, I hope your yacht fucking sinks while you and your plastic wife are aboard having botched elective surgeries.

Investors like this approach because it sells so well even if nothing much is behind it. The logic: don't pay attention to the business model, don't emphasize this, but put everything on companies that appear promising with their product some time far in the future - throw money at it until it is hyped - then sell before reality kicks in.

This is not to say that there are no use cases for LLMs—there certainly are, and in very different contexts. I am simply pointing out that the market value of the companies involved is hopelessly overvalued—far removed from reality.

The only thing that makes this completely reckless approach absolutely foolproof for large investors is the fact that all large investors are involved. This ensures that the share prices will rise until the large investors agree to sell, at which point it won't be long before everything collapses—whether it's a useful technology or a viable product doesn't really matter at this point.

This is how today's stock market works due to the massive centralization of capital: All you need to know is which stocks major investors and politicians, who are paid to pass the relevant legislation, are investing in.

You can make it all seem much more complicated than it really is, but that's the bottom line.

Somebody I'm sure has already said this, but the Turing test assumed AIs would need to prove their intelligence by appearing human in their speech, but now the problem is the opposite, that humans will have to somehow prove that they are not LLMs when they type anything on the internet.

inspiration: Chyrosran22's rant (YouTube Link) on the fact that the term "mechanical keyboard" does not has a widely accepted definition.

What about being around 10000 bananas for 8 hours? Are people on banana plantations at significantly higher risk of cancer?

Come mista tally man
Tally me tumours
Daylight come and me need to go hospital 😔

Besides obvious traps in differing levels of quality of LLM's and resources, being availiable to commoners for cheap or free and paid for corporate rich clients, there's still an undiscovered question about how these different AIs are biased.

After reading a lenghty thread where I've seen many takes about if LLM could've pushed a teen into commiting suicide, I thought to myself: if there are obviously different models availiable, may they be taught differently for each userbase?

May, for example, some genAI for rich and poor differ, helping first ones to procreate and others to die off?

What if some data engineers trained a popular model to represent one specific agenda, to serve their favorite bosses and institutions?

What if, for the argument's sake, their GenAIs serve this role as an enabler of suicide, as it was intentionally programmed for?

Imagine water that flowed into drain hole being pumped back into the showerhead.

However, this is the operational principle of dishwashers.

E: I was hit by this thought after watching Alec's* ramble on dishwasher detergents.

*E2: Alex -> Alec

Not really a shower thought, but a "spraying my hair with dry shampoo before a Teams meeting" thought.

There might also be other reasons, but I don't care to drink my own juice...

We all migrate to smaller websites try not to post outside drawing attention just to hide from the "Ai" crawlers. The internet seems dead except for the few pockets we each know existed away from the clankers

I always have been nervous going into the bank to get my own money. Its funny to me we have a trillionaire that probably has never once had this feeling.

Assuming Salvator, Celebrator, and the like are masculine beers, I would imagine Salvatrix and Celebratrix are their feminine counterparts.